Layout Changes and new plug-ins

I’ve been playing with the wordpress templates for a while. And if you are a regular visitor you might have noticed the changes. The main purpose was to make the site and information more accessible. As the number of articles are growing, I wanted to make sure that new visitors could easily access the older and popular articles. I’ve installed several new plug-ins and rearranged some menu location. You can see a new banner ad that rotates on the top, which gives a kind of change for the regular visitors. So, here are the actual changes I’ve made and motivation behind it.

AdRotator: Installed the AdRotator plug-in for wordpress which rotates the ads automatically. The plug-in is very easy to install and can be implemented at your chosen location to randomly select from a group of advertisements specified in a text file. The ads banner you see at the top of this site is using this plug-in. It displays a new banner ad for every third page. This should give a sense of change to the regular visitors and hopefully some extra income for me 🙂

Categories and Archives: I’ve created several new categories and re-assigned the existing articles to them accordingly. This should make the information more accessible as the number of articles grow. I’ve used Clean Archive Plug-in for my Archives page to display the archives by date.

Popular: This could be a good place to start with for new visitors. Also regular readers can see which articles are actually getting more attention in this blog. And for myself this gives me a better idea about what my readers are finding interesting. I’m using a very cool Awstats plug-in to show the popular posts. This plug-in utilizes the data from web server log analyzer Awstats which I’ve been using for a long time.

Other minor changes:

• Google Search moved on top of the sidebar. It now includes both the web search and site search for Nirlog.com.
• RSS feed subscription is moved up just below the Search bar to make it easily accessible for new visitors.
• AdSense-Deluxe WordPress Plugin which allows me to easily manage and insert AdSense ads in the posts and pages.
• CG-QuickPHP Plugin a plug-in for embedding PHP function calls within the body of a Post or Page. Very useful and I’ve used it in both Archives and Popular pages.

I hope this article will give a better understanding about why things are as they are in this blog and I’ll be very happy if it provides some guidance to other bloggers on what plugins to use for specific purposes. I really enjoy doing this and I’ll be playing around changing small bits here and there all the time :). If you have any suggestions on what plug-ins or layouts could be useful for a blog, you’re welcome to drop your comments.